Page 11 of Trade (After the End #7)

I’m supposed to be disconnected from the horror of it all, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything clearer in my life than the stream, the trees, and the breeze—Dalton’s quick, shallow breath as he traces my eyebrows, the length of my nose, the shell of my ear.

No one has ever looked at me like this before.

I shift. I’ve been on my knees long enough that they’re starting to complain.

“Oh, shit. Sorry,” he says and peels his shirt off. “Here.” He folds it haphazardly and bends to lay it down as a pillow. I have to snatch my hand off his dick so I don’t give it a good yank.

This shirt is dull green and thin. It doesn’t provide much cushion, but I shuffle forward to kneel on it anyway.

Now his cock is right in my face. His quick breathing ripples his cut abs.

A thin line of hair travels the line running down his chest and dusts his belly button.

His skin is golden brown, and he smells earthy and rich—like the Outside.

He’s so beautiful. Is that why I’m not acting the way I should? I didn’t think I cared that much about looks.

Or maybe the way he’s watching me is messing up my head. Is this how Bennett felt when Meghan looked at him? Like there is more to him—something special—that he hadn’t even suspected before?

Dalton’s cock bobs and brushes my cheek. I turn my head, catching the tip between my lips. His lungs hitch, and all his muscles get very, very tense.

I watch him as I take him into my mouth, cupping the silky underside of his shaft with my tongue. A vein pulses wildly in his strained neck. The head of his cock prods my throat, and I gag. He pulls out immediately.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says in a rush.

I blink at his cock, shiny with my spit. “It’s okay. I’m gonna gag a little. Just don’t push it in too much. Let me do it.”

He kind of groans his agreement and clenches his hands into fists, inhaling and exhaling deep and slow through his nose.

I close my eyes and take him in my mouth again. The hinge of my jaw stretches. I relax my throat and suck my cheeks, swirling my tongue as much as I can down his shaft and around the head. I do the whole routine that gets Bennett off the quickest.

I cup Dalton’s balls and press the pad of my middle finger against his perineum. Bennett doesn’t like a finger in his ass, but he likes the suggestion of it.

Except for his breath, Dalton stands perfectly quiet and still. At this point, Bennett would be thrusting, and my eyes would be watering. Is Dalton not into it?

I open my eyes, and my own breath catches. Dalton’s hands are hovering above my head like he wants to hold me in place, but he doesn’t dare. He’s in ecstasy. There is no other way to read his expression.

All of a sudden, I become aware of my body—not the pressure on my knees and aching jaw, but the parts of myself that used to come alive when I felt a man’s eyes on me, that somewhere along the way became so ho-hum that no one bothered looking anymore, not even me in the mirror.

The tautness of my belly as I flex my abs.

The swell of my ass. The thrust of my breasts when I arch my back.

I lick down Dalton’s length and rub his head on my lips, smearing his precum onto my cheeks, making a mess on purpose. He growls low in his throat, a desperate sound, hungry and needy. Tormented.

He wants this so bad. He traded a hundred barrels of oil for it.

The entire future of civilization doesn’t rest on his shoulders. He can drive a truck up and exchange it for a good time.

A sharp, mean knot tangles in my stomach. I did everything right. Everything I was supposed to do. I took my responsibilities seriously, and in the end, I get tossed Outside and end up on my knees.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

I jerk my head back, knocking the hand hovering beside my head away. Dalton startles.

“What?” he asks, glancing around for an intruder or some reason his fun got ruined.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I hike my chin and say. My pulse races. The knot twists. Now he’ll get angry and force me. Of course, I’ll comply, and this will become what it’s supposed to be, a sacrifice to protect the future of the human race. Me eating dirt for the greater good.

He struggles—to catch his breath, to convince himself not to grab my head and take what I took away. I watch him rein himself in. He exhales. Clears his throat. Drops his head back to look at the sky for a few moments.

Finally, he unclenches his fists and says, “Okay.”

He pulls his pants up and sits next to me. He’s not happy, but he’s sitting as close to me as he was before, his knees bent, his upper arm resting against mine.

He drags his backpack over and takes out a parchment packet. He unfolds the paper to reveal a pile of nuts. Pecans. Another delicacy I’ve only had at Administration gatherings.

“Eat,” Dalton says.

I pop a few in my mouth. They’re not as mealy as I remember.

“Here.” Dalton passes me the canteen.

We sit in silence, eating and drinking, as the quality of light changes, the brightness fading and the colors turning matte. Long shadows appear on the grass around us. Night is falling. I’ve only ever seen it through the clouded atrium roof where the gray gradually deepened to black.

My heart beats faster. What if he leaves me here alone in the dark? There are birds. What other animals are around in the woods?

“Gloria?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you want to stop?”

I should make nice. Say something to garner his sympathy.

Instead, I say, “I didn’t really want to do it in the first place.”

He gets very quiet. He keeps holding the pecans, but he doesn’t take any more.

I glance over. His face is still hard. No shame. No anger either. He glances back at me. He really is astonishingly beautiful and so damn young. Is that why I can’t seem to say the smart thing?

“What would make you want to do it?”

“Like how many water purification tablets would it take?” I snort.

He kind of shrugs and waits for me to answer.

“You can’t trade for that.”

“Do you have a man? Inside?” His jaw hardens. His gaze narrows.

“I did. I had a husband.”

“Is he dead?”

I shake my head and take a pecan. I can’t taste it now, but it gives my teeth something to grind.

“What happened to him?”

“He traded up.” I swig from the canteen. Dalton waits for me to explain. “He got a woman we worked with pregnant, so he’s with her now, and I’m”—I gesture around—“Outside.”

He chews on this in silence for a while. I polish off the pecans.

“What’s wrong with him?” he finally asks. The question is absolutely genuine.

I smile for a split second. His attention immediately locks in on my lips.

“I don’t know. Maybe the walls were closing in on him.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Maybe he got bored. He wanted more.”

Dalton is not understanding. His beautiful mouth turns down at the corners. “How many women are in the mountain?”

He must mean the bunker. It feels like information I shouldn’t share—like what Gary Krause was worried about when he said I couldn’t talk. But what is this kid going to do with his backpack and canteen?

“A little more than a thousand.”

His pupils widen. “A thousand?”

“Yeah. How many women are there on the Outside?” The wilderness around us feels empty except for birds and small creatures in the undergrowth, but there must be people.

It was a long gap between the last lottery and mine, but sometimes they come in a rush.

Once a week even. They can’t all be the same men.

Not if it costs a hundred barrels of oil for one of us.

“There are fifty or so in the compound at the Mill. Some of the farm collectives have a few. Maybe seventy-five or eighty total in a hundred square miles. People who have one don’t advertise, so maybe more.”

None of this jibes with what I know. The Outside is barren and incapable of sustaining life, and Outsiders are the roaches who survived the End.

They comb the wreckage of the world and bring us what they find in exchange for women, who for some reason have always been currency, in the Before and now.

Unspoken, there was the idea that the DNA of roaches must be hardy, and isn’t biodiversity good for an ecosystem?

In the back of my mind, that was the thought that nagged me when I went to a woman with the special tea Dad taught me how to brew.

The bunker’s mission is to ensure the survival of the species, so that all of history hasn’t been for naught, and I was dedicated to the mission.

A hundred percent. And yet, wasn’t I a mutineer?

I didn’t see it that way. It was only a cup of tea. A small mercy. And after Dad died, an act of memory.

Why did he do it?

Everything used to make sense and now nothing does. My overwrought brain grasps for something solid and catches onto something Dalton said. “What’s the mill?”

“Uh. It’s the place where they grind the grain.” The way he answers, I can tell he’s being very careful not to let on that he thinks it’s a dumb question.

“You have farms?” Did they reestablish agriculture, or did it never fully disappear?

“Not me.”

“But other people do?”

“Yeah. If they can get the buy-in.”

The only buy-in I know is the twenty credits guys have to put toward the house bank to get into one of the poker clubs, but I get the idea. “What is the buy-in?”

He shrugs. “Fuel. Big working equipment like a tractor or a digger or something like that. Guns.” For the first time, the hollows of his cheeks flush. In embarrassment?

“How much fuel?”

His cheeks darken even more. “A truckload.”

“Like what you traded for me?”

He stops looking at me and glares at the stream.

“You could have bought into a farm?” I prod.

He grunts.

“And there are women at the farms?”

His jaw tics, and he doesn’t answer.

“So why trade for me and end up with nothing?”

“I didn’t end up with nothing, did I?” He glances back over, and his eyes are on fire. “And I didn’t want to share.”

My belly stirs in a way it hasn’t in years, and I don’t know where to put the feeling—what slot in my conception of the world it belongs in—so I fall back on my new habit and instigate trouble.

“So do I get to keep the tablets?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Even though you didn’t finish?”

“We finished,” he says quietly after a long moment. “You were done.” And then he stands, brushes his palms on his pants, and offers me a hand.

I take it.

We continue walking. He shortens his stride so he stays beside me, and it’s a little harder going without him stomping the grass flat for me with his big boots, but I don’t mind.

We’re entering a more densely wooded area when he asks, like he’d just been musing, “What are you going to do with what you get from the fuel?”

I stop in my tracks. If this were a cartoon from the Before, I’d plunge my ears with my fingers. “What?”

“Do you get scrip for it or what?” Scrip is like credit. Dalton thinks I get the fuel, that I’ll get credit for it. My understanding morphs into a new shape again like clay thrown on a marble slab.

He thinks I sold myself, that this was my trade, not my solemn duty, the highest act of dedication, a sacrifice that will ensure humanity lives on despite the end of the world.

“I don’t get the fuel,” I mumble, distracted by the white-hot rage pumping through my veins. I won’t get anything except a pass on future lotteries and minor infractions.

“Not any of it?” He’s incredulous.

“None of it.” Why didn’t it cross my mind that some of it, at least, should be mine?

I didn’t fight, I didn’t scream or argue, and I didn’t even think, for a single second, that I deserved a fraction of what my body was buying.

If my credits were deposited in my account an hour late on the first Friday of the month, though, I would have been at the Bursar’s Office, hot around the collar, demanding an explanation.

“What the fuck?” he says.

“Yeah. What the fuck,” I repeat. I haven’t been martyred. I’ve been scammed.

Outside is nothing like they said.

There are lakes. Flowers. There’s a living squirrel in a maple tree less than a yard away.

The air doesn’t smell like poison. The longer I breathe, the stronger I feel.

The water I’ve been drinking all day isn’t making me sick.

They lied.

I was hoodwinked.

It sure looks like the world didn’t end at all.